by Alex White
Anne grits her teeth. “That’s just not—”
“We don’t have to talk about it now. We need to make a supply run. Just for basics, food and the like.” She nods, but she looks white as a sheet. Dorian hopes that inside that brain of hers, all the feelings for Blue are starting to die. He needs her alone, emotionally and physically, when he strikes. Make a move too early, and his plan won’t work.
“These are just techs,” he says. “None of them can carry their weight when scavenging. You and I should be the ones to make the first run. We’ve been alone out there before.” He gives her a smirk. “You saw how they looked at me. We’re kind of the mommy and daddy now. Got to take care of the kids.”
“Okay. You’re right…” she says, looking as if she’s trying to psych herself up to go outside.
“If we can get to the front of the SCIF, I saw a couple of boxes of ration bars in the break area. There’s powdered creamer, too. High-calorie content. That’s not going to make everyone happy, but it’ll keep us alive.” A giddiness rushes through Dorian’s veins. A checkmate is about to fall into place. All he has to do is get Anne out the door.
Climate control kicks on, and a familiar thrum fills Rose Eagle’s chambers. A sigh of relief rolls through the room, along with cool air. If the pumps inside the SCIF are moving air from the chillers, that means Juno must be back online. Maybe Blue got it back online, or Marcus.
That means Blue is alive, and out there, too, making her moves. Unlike Dorian, she has the escape pod access codes. She doesn’t have to achieve checkmate. Blue can just win the game.
“The corridors were clear on my way in,” Dorian says. “Never saw a single bug. If we’re going to go, you need to be ready now.”
“Okay,” Anne says. “You’re right. Let me just—no… you’re right. Let’s go.”
“Quick tip, though? Lose the shoes.”
22
DECISIONS
The others stand back from the door, their eyes wide with fear, though they try to hide it. It’s almost cute the way they try to be strong. They must think him so self- sacrificing to volunteer to get them food, and they’re all too happy to agree to let him try it.
That will be their demise.
After a moment of waiting, no hissing creatures appear, so Dorian and Anne dart out into the hallway. He lifts up a cable run access grate, and they both slip inside. He used a lot of these on the way from Titus to Rose Eagle. They’re small, but not impossible for a human adult, with frequent unsecured openings if they need to pop out. The problem with the SCIF is that all of the rooms must be fully secured, so the cable runs aren’t continuous.
They reach a bend in the hallway and Dorian rolls over onto his back, looking through the metal slats to see anything that might lie above. Satisfied that there’s nothing lurking in the shadows, he pushes up the grate, careful to catch it so it doesn’t make a sound when it swings open all the way.
Anne follows, her movements lithe and silent, and Dorian wonders what she used to do for the Marines. In this combat arena, without all the social constructs that make her weak, she’s beautiful. He wants her again, just to remind himself of how great she can be. He imagines what it would be like, grunting and sweaty against a wall while murderous hunters prowl the halls.
It’s not worth it. Not this time.
“You okay?” she asks, her voice low.
“Yeah,” he says. “The next grating is around there.” They pad to the corner, and he watches Anne meticulously check the hallway. Her motion is sure and deliberate.
A clang rings out somewhere deeper in the SCIF. It might be one of the creatures. It might also be Marcus. The synthetic has to be lurking out there creating a distraction in the kennels, working on Juno, or headed toward Rose Eagle.
It’d be nice if they could confirm Blue as dead. Then his work with Anne would be so much easier. She motions him forward, and Dorian quietly jogs to the next grating. He swings it over, dips into the gap, positions himself, gets a couple of yards in—
—and stops dead.
Something obstructs his path. Shafts of light filter through the grating, forming curved blades along a smooth, storm-gray surface. Dorian squints, trying to resolve the details, but it’s about five yards away. Then, it stirs slightly, revealing the telling profile of a snatcher skull. Its fingers twitch, and it presses its lips into them, as though in prayer. It’s curled up, appearing to be fast asleep.
The creatures have made it into the cable runs, a space scarcely big enough for people. A chill runs up Dorian’s spine. He’d thought himself clever for using these. He’d thought they wouldn’t burrow down here.
“Dorian!” Anne hisses. “Dorian, you have to let me in!” He can’t tell her to shut up. If he wakes the lion sleeping before him, it’ll be over in seconds.
“There’s one coming down the hall,” she whispers.
He’s essentially fucked. If he backs out, he’s dead. If it wakes up, he’s dead. Perhaps he could scoot backward, reach up, and close the gate in Anne’s face. It’s not like she could argue with him—not with a ravening orgy of teeth and claws coming down the corridor. But then her inevitable scream would wake Dorian’s new roommate, and that wouldn’t end well.
Dorian Sudler can’t die like this. He won’t. He’s too goddamned important to die on his stomach like some victim, begging for mercy. He deserves to meet his fate on his feet, because he is a fucking fighter and this cannot be the end.
Eyes open and fixed on the shining black death ahead of him, Dorian inches forward. He controls every noise he makes: no banging, no scratching, no loud respiration. It’s less like he’s breathing, and more like his lungs are open caverns through which oxygen sometimes blows.
Slumber soundly, you beautiful creature.
As soon as there’s enough space for her, Anne squeezes into the cable run behind him. She shoves him forward slightly in the action, and his heart seizes with the thrill of it all.
The creature is almost pitch black, but this close, it’s like staring into the fires of Kaufmann. Tears stream down Dorian’s cheeks and a wide smile spreads across his face. Maybe he was wrong about dying on his belly. Crawling within two yards of a sleeping snatcher is the single greatest thing he’s ever done. It’s better than his directorship, his massive gains-share bonus, and any thrill his office can provide.
A clank sounds out atop him, and he almost coughs in surprise. He looks up and finds a webbed, chitinous foot— close enough to touch—gripping the grating above him. A charge of electricity shoots through every part of his brain, lighting it up with all sorts of unhelpful suggestions. He feels the presence of the two creatures weighing upon his trapped, prone body. It is excruciating.
It is exquisite.
And then his mind becalms, as if something inside him gave way. He gingerly rolls onto his back and looks up at the animal. To his surprise, he sees no sexual organs. It rapes its way into this life, only to abandon the pursuit of sex in service of something greater—moving from the co- opting of life to the destruction of the unworthy. Indeed, sex and reproduction would be such disappointing drivers for the greatest of creatures.
As he lies still between the two chitinous grips of a black vise, he wants nothing more than to trick them, to beat them, and control them.
He can’t see Anne, but if she can see past him, she’ll understand that they’re well and truly fucked. He wants nothing more than to reach up and touch the long toe claw of the creature. It would be like a magnet, snapping him up into its grasp, turning the lightest caress into a hard lock. The death urge wells inside him, and he feels his hand moving forward of its own accord.
The foot rises as the creature silently scuttles away.
Snapped out of the moment, Dorian still needs to get Anne to back out, so he gently kicks the top of her head with his bare foot, hoping she won’t protest. He feels her warmth disappear as she slips out of the grate and into the open air. His broad shoulders brush the cable run’s edges
as he backs out after her, keeping his eyes locked on the slumbering snatcher the entire time.
When at last he’s free of the cable run, he places a finger to his lips and takes the grate, shutting it gently behind him. He feels flushed, his cheeks prickle, his skin beads with sweat. Anne is the opposite—flour white, her face locked in grim damage assessment. Dorian points to the thing asleep inside the cable run and she peers over, swallowing visibly at the sight of it. She makes some soldier gestures he doesn’t know, but they end with a finger pointing toward a large fuse box with a shadowed corner.
They sneak across the open floor—the longest twenty yards of Dorian’s life—arriving to huddle together. She pulls him close, whispering into his ear.
“You saved my life, you ridiculous son of a bitch.”
He would’ve died if she’d been caught. He knows that. Even so, he doesn’t bother to disabuse her of her illusions. Instead of answering, he kisses her hard on the lips, sucking in her exhalation, his long hands wrapping around the base of her spine. He then jerks his head toward the break room.
Moving his last piece into position, he has his regrets. He never got to touch one of the snatchers. Never got to watch a live impregnation. Never really closed down the Cold Forge. Still, if this next play goes well, the game is his.
INTERLUDE
ANNE
They arrive at the break room with their breaths catching, their cheeks flushed. This has to be the highest-risk run for coffee creamer in the history of mankind.
Dorian seals the door behind them, and she checks the vents—all too small for one of the bugs. The walls are as thick as any laboratory wall, since space in the SCIF was designed to be repurposed at a moment’s notice. The Cold Forge was supposed to be an example of what Special Projects could do, given the right setup.
Before she can even open her mouth he’s all over her, his hands roving her body, searching under her clothes. They both stink. She’s fucking hungry, and wondering where those ration bars are. There’s very little erotic about the moment, though she suspects Dorian finds eroticism in some strange places. She’s seen this shit before in the field, and some grunts swear by a good “combat jack.” She’s never tried, and doesn’t plan to start.
She refuses, and he accedes.
That might be the thing she likes the most about him. He seems to intuit boundaries better than most of her former partners—certainly better than Blue did.
“Sorry… I got carried away,” he says. “Just celebrating life.”
They’d called Anne a synth fetishist in high school, and at first, Blue had been a dream come true. When she and Blue first started using Marcus’s body to sleep together, Blue had been insatiable, as if she’d never touched another person before. The fact that Blue wasn’t born a man bothered Anne, but the scientist quickly adapted to the role in admirable fashion, and satisfied Anne’s urges in ways others couldn’t.
Then, she’d started wanting to see Anne in person, to be close to her in that extremely mortal body of hers. Anne loved Blue for her perfection, and the female body did little to excite her. At least, that’s what she’d told herself.
She knew now that it was because she couldn’t watch Blue die in close-up. It was too hard, knowing that she’d outlive her lover, and the stronger their bond became, the more painful things would get. Anne broke it off in the one act of cowardice she could remember committing.
“Hey, we need to talk,” Dorian says, interrupting her train of thought. She blinks, looking around the break room.
“Sorry, uh, we should probably supply up and get the fuck back to safety.”
“Anne, stop,” he says, coming to her and touching her shoulders. “You understand that, if we go back with those supplies, we’re going to be doing a dozen of these runs for those ingrates.”
She looks over his face. Dorian is smiling, as if he’s been looking forward to saying whatever it is he’s about to say. She doesn’t like it.
“Hey,” she responds. “Like I said, not now. We need to get those ration bars and get back to the—” She stops, marches over to the cabinets and starts opening them one by one to find mostly empty shelves. There’s some plasticware and a coffee service, but no rations. She turns to Dorian.
“This is what we can salvage from the SCIF.” He plops down a cardboard box, filled with bottles of powdered, non- dairy creamer packets. He points to the count on the box. “There are two thousand packets in here. So that’s… fifteen calories per packet… Thirty thousand calories total.”
She stops herself from gaping. This was never about creamer.
“There are other supplies,” she says. “You said there were bars in here.”
“I needed to talk to you alone, and I think the creamer will prove my point.” He pauses, then continues. “A human can subsist on a steady diet of three hundred calories per day, and you have ten humans—so that’s ten days of food. Now, I’d like you to imagine how this is going to go.” He raises his hands to his face, those slender pianist’s fingers that she’d let touch her. “First, we’re going to rip open these packets of powdered hydrogenated oils and pour them into our mouths like sand.” He mimes doing it with a product model’s smile.
“That’s… twenty packets a day, take them as you like. But there’s no volume, and soon, we’re going to get very fucking hungry. Assuming we don’t turn on each other, you and I will still be going out for supply runs, getting slower and dumber with each passing day, trying to outwit the most perfect killing machines ever born.”
Disgust wells inside of her, and she doesn’t bother to hide it. He can’t be suggesting what she thinks he is.
“So what? That just means we have to get more food from the crew quarters.”
“You may have missed the decompressed bulkheads between here and there,” Dorian says, his face placid save for a twitch in his cheek.
“You don’t know shit about this station, so don’t you fucking talk down to me like that,” she says, her voice low. “I’m the goddamned head of security. Titus is back online. Juno is online. We can equalize the pressure through the maintenance tubes and crawl.”
“Listen, sweetheart,” Dorian says, annoyance snarling his perfect smile. “You may be head of security, but I do risk management for entire quadrants. I’ve seen tens of thousands of these people, these corporate drones, shuffle past. You know what you get when you throw these bullshit, unoriginal losers into crisis? Do you think it’s a miracle? No! They turn on each other!”
“Like you’re doing right now?” Anne steps toward him. She could take out both of this twerp’s kneecaps without breaking a sweat.
He shakes his head. “To turn on someone, you have to be on their side in the first place. You’re the only person on my team, Anne. Now you can run back to your suicide mission,” he says, smoothing a strand of hair away from her face. “Or we can walk around the corner, step into two spacesuits, EVA through the docking area and just go.”
She jerks back from his touch. What a conniving little piece of shit. She clenches her fists, but he gives her that serene smile.
“Think about it,” he says. “One week and a nap, and you could be on Gateway Station.”
She can’t stand to look at him anymore, or she’s going to punch his goddamned lights out. Turning away, she massages her temples.
“Or,” she says through clenched teeth, “you could go fuck yourself.”
Quiet fills the break room. He has no rejoinder. Her breath runs in and out of her lungs in a steady pump as she tries to control the speed and calm herself. Anne massages her eyes. They ache from a lack of sleep. It’s not his fault if he’s panicking. He’s a civvy. Any normal human would start to question things in a situation like this one. She feels badly for the way she’s treated him—he doesn’t have the training for this.
When she turns to tell him so, he hits her in the face with one of the solid aluminum chairs.
Anne’s world rings with the blow and she teeters, desperatel
y grasping for what just happened. Her cheekbone reverberates with pain from the strike, and she’s only just put together the pieces when he hits her again, blasting her across the jaw, snapping it cleanly.
She spills to the ground, a spray of spittle and blood whipping across the deck, glossing over a little white something. Her tongue tells her of the broken shards in her mouth, tells her that’s one of her teeth. She’s about to suck in a breath to scream out when Dorian’s bare foot connects with her ribcage.
Her air comes out in a whoosh. She’s left gasping, and rolls onto her stomach to better protect her face. It can’t end like this. She wraps her hands behind her head, and he shatters her fingers with another blow from the chair. She’s never felt such pain in her life—not from her military service, not ever. Instinctively she draws her hands under her, crying for him to stop with what breath she has.
This is going to be a killing blow. She braces herself.
Instead, he crushes her knee to the ground with his heel, and she feels something inside her leg give way. He hoists the chair and batters her bare feet, her ankles and shins like he wants to flatten them into nothing.
Surprise turns to fury.
Anne lunges for him with her ruined hands, desperately launching from broken legs. He easily dips backward with the same placid smile he always wears. She’ll bite his fucking throat out. He can’t win. He can’t beat her. Not this fucker. She crawls on her elbows, her broken fingers searing with every motion.
“Too, too late, Anne,” he says. “Wish you’d figured it out sooner.”
Her mouth and cheeks are too swollen to form words, but she wants to ask if he’d like to die. She would happily oblige his sorry ass. She’s going to sink what’s left of her teeth into his fucking ankles.
“How to be an animal,” he says. “How to survive. I gave you every chance.”
